Seth Godin argues we’re at a juncture in economic history, just like the rise of mass production in the twentieth century:

The industrial age, the one that started with the industrial revolution, is fading away. It is no longer the growth engine of the economy and it seems absurd to imagine that great pay for replaceable work is on the horizon.

This represents a significant discontinuity, a life-changing disappointment for hard-working people who are hoping for stability but are unlikely to get it. It’s a recession, the recession of a hundred years of the growth of the industrial complex.

Mass production of standardized goods—underpinned by workers doing very tightly defined jobs that can, with relatively minimal training, be done by anyone—provided incredible value. This was because up until then, goods were largely made individually with poorly defined standards and processes, so they were expensive and time consuming to make. Mass production made goods cheap and plentiful because the processes for making them were standardized so that anyone could do it. The twentieth century was almost entirely about turning people into cogs in a machine in order to squeeze as much efficiency out of each one as possible.

Because there were so many gains to be made by using mass production for goods, it helped create an explosion of economic growth and development and, along with it, jobs. We needed cogs for those production processes. This was very beneficial for workers; because there was so much value created by mass production, companies could afford to pay very respectable wages and salaries and provide long-term benefits, all while the worker was responsible for very little more than following a series of steps.

But those gains have now been used up. There’s no more potential for growth in mass production, except in countries where labor costs are lower than others, and that will be used up in time, too. In manufacturing, it’s a race toward eliminating cost as much as possible, and that inevitably means eliminating people altogether.

What Godin argues is that the idea of long-term, stable jobs where individuals are responsible for very little besides doing their very specific job—an idea we grew up believing to be true because that’s what we saw in the twentieth century—is a myth created by the temporary explosion of economic productivity unleashed by mass production. It isn’t something we can always have or something we will soon get back to after this recession is over. It no longer exists.

This means suffering for many people, as we are seeing. Our society has been built on the assumption that, if only we do well in school, there’ll be a stable and respectable job waiting for us. That is no longer the case, and now people will have to adjust to it. A high school diploma and a college degree is no longer a ticket to a comfortable future. Rather than simply put in the time and work to be comfortable, we must now find insights into the world that will make us all better off. That’s the new frontier.

The Age of Insight

The nineteenth century was the age of the industrial revolution, the twentieth the age of mass production, and the twenty-first will be a new age, too, of the same scale.

Godin continues:

When everyone has a laptop and connection to the world, then everyone owns a factory. Instead of coming together physically, we have the ability to come together virtually, to earn attention, to connect labor and resources, to deliver value.

Stressful? Of course it is. No one is trained in how to do this, in how to initiate, to visualize, to solve interesting problems and then deliver. Some see the new work as a hodgepodge of little projects, a pale imitation of a ‘real’ job. Others realize that this is a platform for a kind of art, a far more level playing field in which owning a factory isn’t a birthright for a tiny minority but something that hundreds of millions of people have the chance to do.

Whereas the last century was about making goods—food, clothing, cars, toys—cheap and plentiful, the twenty-first century will be about making insights into what will truly make us better off.

It was easy to make huge gains in quality of life in the early twentieth century: providing any kind of affordable clothing, food and car was a giant leap forward. We can’t make those same gains now. That trick only works once.

Now, we have to be smarter. Now, we have to figure out what’s a better use of resources. We have to figure out what kind of car will both be more environmentally efficient and delight its owners. We have to think about completely disparate fields—say, manufacturing, software development, design, and psychology—and combine them to make products that conform themselves to humans, rather than making humans contort themselves to the product in order to use it. We must think about big ideas—ideas that will change society and how people interact—and the little ideas that merely improve people’s lives just a little.

We have to think. This is an age where all of our gains will come from insights into what make products, services, processes, and structures fundamentally better for us. Whereas the twentieth century was about standardization and following a series of steps in a well-defined process, in this new century, there are no defined processes. Everything is to be questioned, re-thought, re-made, or even thrown out altogether.

This century is about having a vision for the way things should be, and the audacity to make it so. Just a decade or two ago, it took immense amounts of capital to launch an idea that could change the world. Now, it takes a few people with an idea, a computer, and the willingness to learn how to build it.

The only thing holding us back now is ourselves.¹ We are all artists, designers, manufacturers, managers, musicians, writers, creators—if we choose to be. And that is the fundamental difficulty of this new age: we all are responsible for our own success.

The twentieth century had a well-trodden path for people to follow: you graduate from high school, go to college, you’ll get a respectable and stable job, and you’ll live in comfort. Our responsibility did not extend beyond following that path.

That will no longer work. We will all have to take responsibility for ourselves, our future, and our ideas. We have to learn to think this way—to think critically of the things we see, of how they could be better and how we could make it so, and thus to see opportunities for ourselves.

We have to change how we think to be successful in this century, and we have to re-design our schools to prepare people for it. I have some ideas for how to do that, but what’s obvious is we aren’t ready for it yet. Not even close. We’re still preparing kids for the last century.

This is a new age, and we better start thinking about it that way.

1. This is not, unfortunately, true for everyone. Poverty and lack of opportunity takes on a new meaning in this century. Rather than hold people back from an education and access to well-paying jobs, it now means holding people back from education that gives them the opportunity to discover a passion from something and discover a way to make something better and, therefore, make a living for themselves, because they are too busy simply trying to survive. This creates two very different classes in society, and is a fundamental threat to it. This, I think, will be one of the great challenges for our century: how do we not only revamp our educational system for a new economic age, but how do we truly make education available to everyone so everyone can participate? [↩]

Watts Martin, on the web going away:

That last part doesn’t require any “dominant platform”; it just requires open data standards.

Darren Murph:

And then there’s the stuff we simply can’t know about. I’m surmising that Netflix is on the precipice of locking down a few streaming deals that’ll have everyone smiling. Reed knows good and well what you want — you want more new content available for Watch Instantly, and you want more television shows to appear in a more timely manner. I’d wager that he’s working on it. Hard. And by getting the laggard of the bunch off of his mind (and onto that of Andy Rendich), he’s in a much better position to accelerate the service that everyone actually cares about. Fast forward five years, and I’ll bet that hardly anyone’s clamoring over Qwikster at all.

Megan McArdle on Netflix:

So maybe the idea is that while customers are already mad, and analysts gloomy, you might as well make them as mad and gloomy as possible.  The DVD business has to die eventually, so do what you can now to hasten the demise, even if it alienates a few more customers. Meanwhile, use the opportunity to herd Netflix customers into the streaming service, while creating a new brand eventually gives Netflix the psychological distance they need to shut the DVD business down.  (We’re not pulling a service!  We’re shutting down an unprofitable business unit.  It’s not even called Netflix!).  

Well, you can’t blame Netflix for moving too slow.

Netflix’s Reed Hastings announced on their blog tonight that they are separating their streaming and DVD rental businesses:

So we realized that streaming and DVD by mail are becoming two quite different businesses, with very different cost structures, different benefits that need to be marketed differently, and we need to let each grow and operate independently. It’s hard for me to write this after over 10 years of mailing DVDs with pride, but we think it is necessary and best: In a few weeks, we will rename our DVD by mail service to “Qwikster”.

I suppose you could read this as a panicked move in response to the steep decline of their stock after news came out that they would lose Starz’s movies for their streaming service, but I don’t think that’s it. If anything, this move could further destabilize their stock, rather than reassure investors—it’s a huge change, and if you’re down on Netflix’s streaming business, you’re going to be even more negative on the company as a whole after this.

They want out of the DVD rental business and this is a large step toward the day when they’re out of it completely.

I’m a little late here, but Aaron Mahnke’s released something pretty neat: Helvetindex Cards.

They’re nice little index cards for taking notes, to-dos, or doodling new ideas on.

Gowalla is changing focus:

When you load up Gowalla, the first thing you see is still a main activity feed. Here you’ll find the activity from your friends. Because Gowalla isn’t completely pivoting away from their core location functionality, much of the data and social connections remain intact. But instead of a stream of check-ins, you’ll notice people hanging out together. They’re checking-in, but they’re also taking pictures and talking to one another in clusters that are known as “Stories”.

The main middle tab is now “Guides”. Here you’ll find curated travel guides for various places around the world. For example, if you load up the app in San Francisco, you’ll see the San Francisco guide, as well as the East Bay guide and the Stanford guide. You can quickly scroll through other guides not near you as well. And Gowalla has the ability to make special guides on the fly. For example, they made a TC Disrupt guide for event-goers.

Interesting idea—turn all of this data that we have about where people are going and how much they like the place into relevant guides to where people should visit when traveling. There’s going to be a lot more of this kind of stuff, where we’re creating higher level knowledge based on the mountains of data we’re creating every day.

Tim Carmody, on the Amazon tablet:

You sit on the couch and flip your fingers across the screen like you were thumbing through a catalog or a magazine. But every image and advertisement is connected to a digital store, powered by Amazon. With one click, you’ve bought it: Either it’s delivered to your machine immediately, over the air, or is delivered to your door in less than two days.

That’s one way to get advertisers to embrace a device.

(Via Tory Briggs.)

Shawn Blanc’s got a new site, and it’s called Tools and Toys.

Neat idea, and there’s already a bunch of great items on there.

Marco Arment questions whether an Amazon tablet needs to do productivity apps at all:

If Amazon can deliver a $249 tablet that does a serviceable job for reading books, browsing some top newspapers and magazines, watching movies and TV shows, and playing some casual games, that’s going to be very attractive to a lot of people.

This debate centers on where Amazon plans on positioning their tablet. If they view it as an iPad-like tablet, where it can replace a PC for most use cases (web browsing, email, calendar, address book, word processing), then it almost certainly has to include those applications and do them somewhat well. If, rather, they see it as a casual use device (reading, media and games), then there’s little need for it.

Basically, you can sum it up like this: does Amazon want to build a post-PC device, that can replace a computer for most intents or purposes? Or do they want to build an accessory device? There’s good reason to think they would be better off going with the latter.

Inkling, a digital textbook platform for the iPad, is getting a few new features:

Inkling’s technology delivers interactive textbooks that include the ability to collaborate, add multimedia and communicate within content. The startup adds another layer to online textbooks by adding 3-D objects, video, quizzes, and even social interaction within the content. Inkling’s sync technology lets students collaborate in real time by sharing their notes and highlights with one another. And students can see comments from their friends and professors right alongside their own notes.

The newest version of the platform has made established ‘Study Groups’ within textbooks, where students can ask questions and add comments anywhere in the book with classmates, professors and others who are reading the same book using Inkling. Inkling has also added ‘expert’ notes to the book, allowing students to get access to their notes and comments.

For two of my courses this semester, I’m using only digital textbooks—and one of them is an Inkling book. I’m really excited to use it, because there’s so much potential on the iPad to make textbooks much better learning tools than they are in print. Inkling is taking advantage of some of them, and I can’t wait to try it out.

It’s a bit risky, of course; it’s still cheaper to rent textbooks than it is to purchase their digital versions, and there’s a very real chance that I won’t be able to access the textbook in the future because of format obsolescence or because Inkling doesn’t survive. Nonetheless, though, this is absolutely the future.

Om Malik reports that Microsoft was in acquisition talks with Motorola, too:

Our sources say that Motorola was in acquisition talks with several parties, including Microsoft for quite some time. Microsoft was interested in acquiring Motorola’s patent portfolio that would have allowed it to torpedo Android even further. The possibility of that deal brought Google to the negotiation table, resulting in the blockbuster sale.

Smart—if underhanded—move by Microsoft, if true: by talking to Motorola about acquiring them, there are two outcomes, all a net-positive for Microsoft. The first is the talks go well and they go through with it and purchase them, and now have even more patents to use against Android; the second possibility is they force the already cornered Google to overbid for Motorola and potentially damage their Android platform.

Heads I win, tails you lose at its finest.

Interestingly, Malik also says that Motorola found Google a more acceptable home because Microsoft had no interest in running a hardware business, and was only interested in their patent portfolio.

Google says they are going to keep Motorola operating as a separate company, but it’s going to be very difficult to keep Google and Motorola’s operations separate. The next time Google wants to make a flagship Android device to demonstrate what the platform is capable of, their natural partner will be the company they already own—but somehow I don’t think the U.S. government, or Google’s Android partners, are going to like that idea so much.

Google published quotes from a few Android licensees about Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility.

Samsung’s:

We welcome today’s news, which demonstrates Google’s deep commitment to defending Android, its partners, and the ecosystem.

This might be the first link I’ve ever posted where you don’t need to click through. All of the quotes say precisely the same thing.

For some reason, the word “creepy” comes to mind.

Chris Martucci:

I wish that all writers would “raise the bar,” so to speak. I doubt that this will happen. Writing seems to degrade as time progresses. I have considered before the possibility that good writing has not worsened in itself, but rather, since technology makes it possible for an unprecedented number of people to publish their thoughts, good writing has been lost, buried amongst a sea of mediocrity.

Jeff Bezos has a few excellent ideas for how to reform our patent system:

Much (much, much, much) remains to be worked out, but here’s an outline of what I have in mind:

1. That the patent laws should recognize that business method and software patents are fundamentally different than other kinds of patents.

2. That business method and software patents should have a much shorter lifespan than the current 17 years — I would propose 3 to 5 years. This isn’t like drug companies, which need long patent windows because of clinical testing, or like complicated physical processes, where you might have to tool up and build factories. Especially in the age of the Internet, a good software innovation can catch a lot of wind in 3 or 5 years.

3. That when the law changes, this new lifespan should take effect retroactively so that we don’t have to wait 17 years for the current patents to enter the public domain.

4. That for business method and software patents there be a short (maybe 1 month?) public comment period before the patent number is issued. This would give the Internet community the opportunity to provide prior art references to the patent examiners at a time when it could really help. (Thanks to my friend Brewster Kahle for this suggestion.)

Two and four are brilliant. Reducing patent lifespans to 3-5 years would instantly make our current patent problems much smaller, because not only would patents be invalidated rather quickly, but because their lifespan is so short, people would have much less reason to file them in the first place.

By the way, note the date on this.